Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr in 2015. He made millions selling his scripts to actors such as Robert De NiroALBERTO ESTEVEZ/EPA

When Philip Kerr was a boy, his God-fearing father kept a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover “locked in a closet in case someone from the church came visiting”.

By the time Philip was 11 years old, he had found the key and discovered a precocious world of adult literature, way beyond his early reading of Biggles and Just William. “I knew I liked Lady Chatterley’s Lover but I wasn’t quite sure why,” Kerr recalled. “I wanted to take this book to school to show off to my friends — it was the 1960 Penguin edition that went to court for obscenity — but I knew my dad would miss it. So I decided to write my own story, inspired by Lawrence.”

The soft-porn tale was…

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